“What defines art?”

One of those glorious 2 am questions that energizes the body as the mind starts to churn.Rion, my Milan host who I know from Brooklyn, posed the question as we walked back with his girlfriend Francesca to their Milan apartment. It was the second time that night we three had walked down their block with the intention of going home. The first was abandoned after we passed 3 strangers who’s eyes betrayed what they were doing, and we wanted to be a part of it.

I used one of the three words in Italian I knew to say hello and ask how they were. The leader of the pack, Mike, looked confused and watched my lips with half closed lids as I repeated in English. He asked where I was from and then what I did. Rion started talking to his friends as we stood in a skewed mid-sidewalk circle. Mike had an LA Clippers hat on and the other two wore hoodies and matching sneakers with the velcro strap undone.  I told him I was a writer and drew a fake cursive word, with extra flourish, in the air.  Me same! he said and his eyes opened wider.

Yes, I felt it. An instantaneous connection. A bond over words. I suspected he was a poet, perhaps a spoken word artist. I started to think of my friends back in New York who are involved in the slam poetry scene and with whom I’d want to connect him with if it turns out his stuff was good. He seemed like he would do well in a battle. Impassioned Italian man spittin’ verses, driving the words home with dramatic arm movements and inflection that demands ears.

I asked if he wrote fiction or journalism or poetry, but the language proved a problem. He asked Francesca in Italian if we wanted to walk to the little park between the church and the McDonald’s for a drink and a smoke. His friends looked bored by the idea of 3 new additions and split off to go buy beer.

As we were walking Mike turned to me and said he wanted to show me his writing. That if I came to the park tomorrow during the day, we could create something together. Imagine! A beautiful afternoon in Milan spent sipping a spritz while creating a bilingual piece, maybe one that we could practice and perform! I thought of Mike and I in Rion’s living room with a few of their friends gathered to hear us share our art. I didn’t think he was attractive or all that exciting, but I was in love with the thought of it all and smiled a little brighter. We agreed in a few words: tomorrow, some park he named, creation time.

Francesca was walking behind us, and I paused to take step with her, not wanting her to feel left out. Isn’t it cool, I said, he’s a writer too! What are the chances of meeting another writer so randomly?

Mike turned around, I’ll show you good and bad, he said and pointed towards a wall.

I think he mean’s street writer, like what’s the word in English?

Graffiti, Rion said, he’s a graffiti artist.

Heart sunk. Supposed connection severed. He had thought I meant I was a graffiti artist from New York City. No, definitely not as cool nor as elusive as that.

He stopped in front of a gate of a closed shop, where someone had painted a mural of a mom and a child holding hands. It was vey well done in my opinion and must have taken the artist a long time to do it with spray paint.

He hates it, Francesca translated. Not art, Mike said. He says the artists are, what’s the word-

Selling out? Rion was standing closest to the gate, nose an inch away, looking at the strokes and lines.

He says the companies pay the artists to paint these and this is all they do. They cover the art that is already there.

We turned a corner down a quieter street. Mike stopped again and pointed at the wall. Artist tags ran up and down it, some more easily read than others. Most were composed of single swooping strokes. A few of them were scribbled symbols. This is real, said Mike.

This is great, Rion said, stepping back to take in the length of the wall. Are you on here? Mike shook his head. He made a waving motion with his hand and said in Italian that it was covered up by another artist. He’d come back and cover someone else’s and leave his name. So it went.

I was trying to figure out if Rion was serious or just being friendly to the guys who had just smoked us up. I had seen and been involved in works of art that Rion created, and considered him a talented artist with a unique perspective. I had posed topless for him for an art piece and it was the first time I hadn’t felt shame being exposed. He had a way about him like that, I thought. I was always ready to hear his opinion and I had assumed that he would have denounced the wall as what it was: vandalism charading as art. He touched the wall and traced a name with his finger.

Can we go see the lady? I want to show Erin. Mike didn’t seem to understand but started to follow as Rion turned and with his daddy long leg strides led the way down the main street. 2 am on a Saturday night in Milan looks a lot like 2 am in NYC. Except in Milan you can drink on the street. People, younger than our party, were strewn about on benches, outside of late night eateries, laughing and talking loudly. It was one big playground and I wondered who were the king and queen and what the rules were. There were a lot of short skirts and bright lips, dark hair with darker-lined eyes and leather, leather, leather. I wondered if they could smell the American on us.

After another 5 minutes, the effects having worn off and given way to that shrill November bone-cold, we paused in a walkway behind the chain railing that divided it from the street. Across the skinny road was a large black door with an oval arch that seemed characteristic of the area. On the door, someone had painted the image of a face reminiscent of the angels I had seen in the church frescos. Cherubim cheeks and round features, soft and inviting. Except, there was hell in the divine. Something empty and eery stared back at us. Black relief spaces fore the eyes and mouth. If I put my hand through her eyes, it might go all the way through. I wondered what eyes like that had seen, what they held as they took in the street. She couldn’t tell us, she was forbidden.

The artist had used feathered strokes, intentionally asking the eyes to swoop upward towards the top of the arch. Begin staring into the black mouth, where searing nothingness gaped. Continue up to crater eyes, sunk deep into the door yet even blacker still. Find the tip of the forehead where her hair has been parted and wind-blown. She’s stunning, Rion whispered, my favorite piece. It’s like we’re at a museum, he said as he stepped over the low chain rail.
He took out the YES stickers in his pocket. The same campaign he had started in Brooklyn, decorating everything from curbs to traffic signs, going so far as to make large scale prints to wheat paste on building facades, he was continuing internationally. Fearless in his disregard for propriety, his artistry flowed out two middle fingers stuck up to the world. Any moment there could be a confrontation. I could feel it just below our breathing: how much we all wished for the polizia to join us hand guns un-holstered, coming from down the block at a sprint as they shouted in Italian. Even Rion knew it was the thrill of the act rather than the result. For the artist and the audience there is knowledge of the illicit whenever they see what shouldn’t be there. It’s not what it is but how it got there that excites the imagination. Someone got away with something they shouldn’t have done, and in that way we share a secret we’ve been holding all alone.

How we wanted him to be confronted, and cuffed. Once they found out he was American they’d take extra pleasure in a jab to the ribs, eyes flashing a well-groomed distrust and disliking. A little adventure that night, that’s what we all craved. You could smell the desire, hot and damp like sex in a bar bathroom. It stretched along the alleyways and wrapped itself around street lights and cigarette butts.

About 8 stickers later Rion rejoined his audience on the other side of the railing to view his work. In the black hole of the Madonna’s mouth he had made a tongue out of YES’s. The screeching night-people walked back and forth down the street as we stood and looked at defamation called art. The act having been committed, there was a sadness to the scene. Had the Madonna said yes or had someone spoken for her, I wondered. I thought of my mother. Physically altered by his hands, the sticking and the smoothing and he hadn’t even been caught. No one had said anything. We didn’t even get a show out of it and now the world saw there Madonna, sticking out her tongue in fevered defiance.

He’d made her go mad for the world to see.